Donald Savage
Headquarters, Washington Dec. 9, 2002
(Phone: 202/358-1727)
Mary Hardin
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
(Phone: 818/354-0344)
RELEASE: 02-239
NASA'S REVEALING ODYSSEY
The latest observations from NASA's Mars Odyssey
spacecraft, highlighting water ice distribution and infrared
images of the Red Planet's surface, are being released this
week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union
in San Francisco.
"The Odyssey science mission is going exceptionally well,"
said Dr. Jeffrey Plaut, the Odyssey project scientist at
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif.
"The instrument teams have already collected a huge volume
of data, and the presentations at this conference are the
most extensive and illuminating of the mission so far," he
said.
In mid-October the frozen carbon dioxide, which seasonally
caps Mars' North Pole, evaporated enough to give Odyssey's
scientists their first chance to look there for ice.
"We are really excited about what we are seeing in the
North Polar Region of Mars. With the seasonal carbon dioxide
frost gone, we can see evidence of massive amounts of water
ice in the soil, even more than we found in the South,"
said Dr. William Boynton, principal investigator for
Odyssey's gamma-ray spectrometer suite at the University of
Arizona, Tucson.
"The infrared and visible images have revealed a wonderful
diversity of surface types and features. Nighttime
temperature images show complex patterns of rock layers,
rocky debris, sand and dust produced by impact cratering,
wind erosion and deposition," said Dr. Philip Christensen,
principal investigator for Odyssey's thermal-infrared
imaging system at Arizona State University, Tempe. "Color
infrared images of Mars show variations in rock layers
similar to those seen in the layered rocks of the Grand
Canyon. The visible color images show Mars to be a dusty
place, with most of the surface covered by a thin layer of
bright orange-red dust," he said.
"The Martian radiation environment experiment has observed
very different space weather near Mars than has been seen
during the same period by satellites near Earth," said Dr.
Cary Zeitlin, principal investigator for that experiment at
the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, Houston.
"Variations in space weather are caused by solar activity,
including solar flares. To help us understand these events,
we compare data from Odyssey to data from similar
instruments in orbit around Earth. The recent observations
are particularly exciting because Earth and Mars have been
on opposite sides of the Sun," he said.
JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena, manages the Mars Odyssey mission for NASA's Office
of Space Science in Washington. Investigators at Arizona
State University in Tempe, the University of Arizona in
Tucson and NASA's Johnson Space Center, Houston, operate the
science instruments. Additional science partners are located
at the Russian Aviation and Space Agency and at Los Alamos
National Laboratories, New Mexico. Lockheed Martin
Astronautics, Denver, the prime contractor for the project,
developed and built the orbiter. Mission operations are
conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL.
Additional information about the 2001 Mars Odyssey is
available on the Internet at:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/odyssey/
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